Voice driven type design

With voice driven type design (VDTD), we introduce a novel concept to present written information in the digital age. While the shape of a single typographical character has been treated as an unchangeable property until today, we present an innovative method to adjust the shape of each single character according to particular acoustic features in the spoken reference. Thereby, we allow to keep some individuality and to gain additional value in written text which offers different applications - providing meta-information in subtitles and chats, supporting deaf and hearing impaired people, illustrating intonation and accentuation in books for language learners, giving hints how to sing - up to artistic expression. By conducting a user study we have demonstrated that - using our proposed approach - loudness, pitch and speed can be represented visually by changing the shape of each character. By complementing homogeneous type design with these parameters, the original intention and characteristics of the speaker (personal expression and intonation) are better supported.